Thursday, October 2, 2008

Working against the pull

I played today. It wasn't a disaster like last time. I was toying with the idea of bending over more to perhaps reduce my pulling occurances, but I watched Anna Soranstam's swing on YouTube and decided that if she can hit so straight at her torso angle, which is similar to mine, then I should keep mine and look for another way to fight the pulling. So I double- checked my swingplane by doing the "Downswing Exercise" and felt (but didn't see) that I should be a little flatter at the top. Flatter would make it easier to avoid that pulling. Tentatively I say it seems to be working. The shots seemed to be better all around. The correction toward flatter is very minor though. Some days later I realized that my pulling is simply turning back to the ball too much on the downswing. The cure for this is unfortunately to just not do it. You have to back off on the body turning force and let the arms do their job. For me there two ways to do this. One is just hitting some slow swing shots correctly and then ramping up the downswing speed gradually until the problem reappears, then backing off a little. The other method is to do the downswing portion of the Downswing Exercise faster and faster, while getting it right.  A variation mentioned in an earlier post is such a slow backswing that the top position is virtually static.